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2010年10月19日 星期二

Master who plays his cards right

打扫过卫生间的CEO

Master who plays his cards right

Not many corporate chiefs would admit to having cleaned bathrooms as part of their training, but Ajay Banga, chief executive of MasterCard, is not your typical business leader. “Cleaning bathrooms,” which he did in the 1990s while opening Kentucky Fried Chicken and Pizza Hut restaurants in India for PepsiCo, “made me very valuable to my wife”, he says. “I’m called the bathroom fairy at home.”

That willingness to poke fun at himself extends to his appearance. As a Sikh, Mr Banga, 50, wears a turban and has a full beard, making for a striking contrast with Robert Selander, his predecessor and current vice-chairman. “Bob and I joke about it all the time,” Mr Banga says. “I know I look different from a lot of people around the world, but I don’t view that as something that defines me.”

His affability is disarming, but it also masks a competitive streak that propelled Mr Banga from fast food to one of the top jobs at Citigroup, where he ran the global consumer bank, before joining MasterCard last year with a promise of quickly being promoted to chief executive.

Since then, he has set about shaking up MasterCard’s sleepy culture. The company processes more than 22bn transactions a year, at the speed of 140 milliseconds each, faster than the blink of an eye. Its entire business depends on making sure each of those transactions clears without a hitch, a model that tends to reward reliability over risk-taking. “When somebody swipes a card in Guam and that card was issued in Bangalore, if it doesn’t go through, that’s the end of my so-called guarantee,” he says.

To speed up decision-making, Mr Banga has given lower-level employees more authority to negotiate contracts and has created a new division to better compete with electronic payment systems such as PayPal. The urgency Mr Banga is trying to instil in employees also applies to him. Any request to which he does not respond within two weeks is automatically approved. “He operates on Ajay time, which is about 10 times faster than everyone else,” says Josh Peirez, the head of MasterCard’s business development unit.

An extrovert, who encourages staffers to drop by his office to discuss everything from the quality of the coffee in the cafeteria to world affairs, Mr Banga can also be extremely blunt, a quality that has rubbed off on other executives. Mr Selander says that Mr Banga has taught him to be more direct in his feedback. “After two hours with Ajay, you know exactly what he thinks,” he says.

At a leadership meeting in December, Mr Banga grew impatient when executives spouted too many platitudes. “I told them: ‘I’m not going to let this conversation end here. You’re not being as forthright as you need to be.’ ” So he had the executives anonymously write down on index cards the five things that bothered them most. Their answers led him to slash the company’s bureaucracy by improving the expenses policy, hiring process and procedures for signing on new clients. “A lot of what we did came from these touchy, feely meetings,” he says.

Playing the role of corporate psychoanalyst is a world away from where Mr Banga started. As the son of a lieutenant-general in the Indian army, who was transferred from post to post every two years, Mr Banga had a nomadic childhood. “The moving around made me who I am,” he says. “I make friends easily. I adjust easily to new situations. I was always the new kid on the block, so I had to learn to break into established groups.”

He believes it also made him more open to divergent points of view. “When you come to the US and hear people talking about diversity, well, I grew up with it,” he says.

他认为，这也让他更能够接受各种不同的观点。“到了美国，听别人谈论多样性，嗬，我就是在这种氛围中长大的，”他表示。

In spite of his globetrotting, he has not abandoned his Indian heritage. On the 30-minute drive from his Manhattan home to MasterCard’s I.M. Pei-designed headquarters in Purchase, New York, he tunes in to Sikh radio, which airs traditional hymns. Yet he is also thoroughly Americanised. He loves baseball (the Mets), listens to Quincy Jones and Lady Gaga and “owns practically every Elvis Presley album that you could think of”.

After receiving a bachelor’s degree in economics from Delhi University and an MBA from the India Institute of Management, he joined Nestlé in 1981 as a management trainee. Thirteen years later, Mr Banga signed on as director of marketing for PepsiCo Restaurants in India. He was charged with doing everything from choosing the right-sized chickens – too big, and they do not fry properly – to working the register and, yes, cleaning those bathrooms.

When he learnt that PepsiCo was planning to spin off its restaurant division, Mr Banga decided it was time for a career change. He wanted to work for a large global enterprise and, as a standalone business, PepsiCo’s restaurants would be a far smaller and less well-capitalised company. “I realised I was in the wrong place at the wrong time,” he says.

He accepted a job with Citigroup, where he briefly served as a debt collector before going on to become head of marketing for the consumer bank.

他接受了花旗提供的一份工作，干了很短时间的收债工作后，很快升任花旗个人银行业务营销主管。

Although banking was an entirely different industry, he saw similarities to the restaurant business. “One is share of throat, the other is share of wallet.” By the time he left in 2009, he had been promoted to chief executive of the Asia-Pacific division.

With his 50th birthday looming, Mr Banga started to think seriously about what he wanted to do with the rest of his career. He considered teaching but couldn’t resist the urge to run a public company. So when a headhunter called him at his Hong Kong home late one night to talk about becoming the chief operating officer of MasterCard, he was intrigued. He flew to Connecticut in March 2009 and met Mr Selander at his home. The two talked for five hours. Mr Banga came away thinking that “this was a job that used all of my skills, yet wasn’t something I had done before”.

The clincher: when the board offered Mr Banga the job, it promised to promote him to chief executive by June 30, when Mr Selander, who had run the company for 13 years, planned to retire from day-to-day management. Just to be sure, Mr Banga negotiated a $4.2m signing bonus that would have been his if MasterCard failed to make good on its promise.

Mr Banga’s accomplishments have certainly been financially rewarding. At a time when compensation has come under scrutiny, his $13.5m pay package means he is earning more than the heads of Goldman Sachs and Bank of America. And although success runs in the family – Mr Banga’s older brother Vindi was a former Unilever executive who now works for the private equity firm Clayton, Dubilier & Rice – Mr Banga does not take it lightly. “To join Citi 14 years ago as a lower-level executive in India and end up as one of the top people at the company, that’s pretty good,” he says.